Carter or Reagan?

Commentary: Jury still out on Obama near end of first year

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- President Barack Obama has accomplished at least one miracle in his first year of office. Like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, he has succeeded in bringing the GOP back to life as a contender in next year's midterm elections.

It was only a year ago that pundits wondered whether the Republican Party could ever recover from the shambles left by the 2008 election.

But a recent poll by George Washington University found that a generic Republican candidate in next year's congressional elections would get a full 2 percentage points more votes than a generic Democrat, scoring 42% to 40%.

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Of course, Obama has not made this happen all by himself. He has had a lot of help from congressional Democrats. More than two-thirds of the likely voters surveyed in the GWU Battleground Poll -- 68% -- disapproved of the job performance of Congress -- an 11-point increase from the disapproval rating in the previous poll last July.

The dithering by Democrats has cost them more in the eyes of the voters than taking the actions they feared would cost them votes. Since many of them are likely to lose office anyway -- if they don't choose to "retire" before the election -- they might have done better losing office by standing up for something they believe in.

Least popular since Truman

In the meantime, Obama's approval rating -- put at 50% in the GWU poll -- slumped to 47% in a recent Gallup poll, lower than any other president at this point in his tenure, going back to Harry Truman.

A lot hinges on the final outcome of the health-care reform legislation. If some form of the bill actually makes it into law and Americans truly have the prospect of more accessible and cheaper health insurance -- that might help the poll numbers for both Obama and the congressional Democrats.

Approval ratings don't tell the whole story, either. After all, Jimmy Carter had a 57% approval rating in the Gallup poll after his first 10-1/2 months in office, and Ronald Reagan had only 49%. Yet Reagan is seen as a transformative president akin to Franklin Roosevelt, while Carter is largely deemed a failed one-term president.

Reagan's reputation rests on two main achievements -- his push to deregulate the economy and his determination to end the Cold War by killing off Communism. It was particularly his economic reform that he promoted during his first year in office, mounting several legislative initiatives before the inevitable congressional gridlock set in during the last seven years of his presidency.

If health-care reform actually passes, it could be Obama's claim to fame going into the 2010 and 2012 elections. Historians could then decide whether Obama and Rahm Emanuel should have pressed harder to include a public option in the legislation.

But even the successful passage of healthcare reform will not save many Democrats next year unless the jobless rate comes down and efforts to stem foreclosures show more success.

The people out of work or evicted from their homes, regardless of their political affiliation, are not likely to blame the minority party in Washington. Even if they don't vote for the Republican candidate, they are hardly likely to go out and vote for a Democratic incumbent who failed to save their job or their house.

As for Obama, what has been most striking about his first months in office is the triumph of calculation over conviction, and his timidity in the face of everyone from the barons of Wall Street to the rulers of China.

For someone who campaigned on audacity and called for bold action, Obama has disappointed his followers most in his tentativeness on issues from financial regulatory reform to Afghanistan. The debacle at the global warming talks in Copenhagen also can be pinned on a lack of leadership by the United States, starting with Obama and the Senate Democrats.

Voters don't like weakness in a leader. Just ask Jimmy Carter. Obama himself hailed Reagan as a transformative president. The jury is still out as to whether Obama will emerge as a Carter or a Reagan.

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